29 Posts found for Author: Jim Collins

Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Subjects: Human Resources, Management

Chief Executive magazine interviews Jim Collins. This is the first of five parts.

Content: Article, Thought Leader | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Chief Executive | Subject: Leadership

If your company cannot be great without you, it is not yet a great company. It is merely a group of people who happen to have a leader. The test as to whether it’s a great company is it doesn’t need you.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

In business, people confuse leadership and power all the time. If you have a lot of power, it can look like you’re leading, but actually you’re just using power. Strip away all your power and would people still do what needs to be done? Then you know you’re leading. That’s really what leading is about.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Chief Executive | Subject: Leadership

When we were studying in Built to Last, we were looking at companies that were visionary through generations, which meant sometimes you had to discount the role of any individual leader. You couldn’t say that Walt Disney was Disney because Walt Disney’s walking around anymore. There’s something about the company. And I still believe that. I still believe that even if you go back to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

The author of “Good to Great” went to West Point to teach leadership. Instead, he was the one who got schooled.

Content: Article | Authors: Bo Burlingham, Jim Collins | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Leadership

If you could pick one and only one ratio—profit per x (or, in the social sector, cash flow per x)—to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine? We learned this single question leads to profound insight into the inner workings of an organization’s economics …

Do you need to have a single denominator? No, but … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Subject: Management

The leadership expert sits down with Inc. editor-at-large Bo Burlingham to talk about what makes great companies tick.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Bo Burlingham, Jim Collins | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Best Practices, Management, People

What do humans do? We create. We don’t have to learn to be creative. We have to unlearn what gets in the way of our creativity. Discipline, on the other hand, is not the natural human state. So it’s a differentiating factor. What is super rare is the ability to blend creative thinking with discipline and to do it in such a way that the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Creativity, Innovation

In defining greatness, I think it’s important to differentiate between inputs and outputs. People sometimes confuse the two. There are a lot of important inputs, but greatness is in the outputs. So what are the outputs? I would say there are three. The first is truly superior performance in the arena in which you operate. In sports, your team has to win championships, or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Management, Success / Failure

Core ideology does not come from mimicking the values of other companies – even highly visionary companies; it does not come from following the dictates of outsiders; it does not come from reading management books; and it does not come from a sterile intellectual exercise of “calculating” what values would be most pragmatic, popular, or profitable. When articulating and codifying core ideology, the key step … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jerry I. Porras, Jim Collins | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subject: Management

If we had to distill our six-year research project into one key concept that conveys the most information about what it takes to build a visionary company that can adapt to a changing world, we would adapt the yin/yang symbol. We selected the yin/yang symbol to represent a key aspect of highly visionary companies: they do not oppress themselves with what we call the “Tyranny … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jerry I. Porras, Jim Collins | Source: Prism (Arthur D. Little) | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

Creativity is natural and abundant, the natural human state. We are creative beings. Being creative is not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out how to marry creativity to discipline so that the discipline amplifies the creativity, rather than squelching it. Truly great entrepreneurs do not just have a great idea (and often, they copy their ideas from others). … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: 800-CEO-READ (8CR) | Subjects: Creativity, Execution, Innovation

Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have spent close to a decade digging deep into what makes these companies tick, and how other managers and leaders can apply those truths to their own organizations. Their research is revealed in their new book, Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All. An interview with the authors.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Jim Collins, Morten T. Hansen | Source: 800-CEO-READ (8CR) | Subject: Management

The new question
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Jim Collins, Morten T. Hansen | Subject: Management

I see nothing to contradict the principle that who comes first and what comes second, for a very simple reason: If you cannot predict the what, you have to be able to do a good job with the who, because the what is going to be constantly shifting.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subject: Management

From Built to Last to Good to Great and now to Why the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins has established himself as the leading management thinker of our time. The former Stanford University Business School professor turned mega-selling author and avid rock climber is the driven researcher and thinker whom many leading companies look to for advice on how to grow, how to improve their … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Jim Collins, Stephen Bernhut | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, People

Success is constantly a journey. You’re always trying to better understand the sources of your success and the things that could imperil you. If you actually think that you have all those answers, you stop asking the questions. Well, what happens if, in fact, you were wrong about part of it? And then things start to go awry because you’ve lost that inquisitiveness, the will … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Leadership, Success / Failure

What has made the biggest impression on me in terms of an approach to any kind of organized performance, an approach to life that you just see it across, no matter what lens you put on, you see it? It’s this idea of the primacy of “Who” over “What.” We see it in the research that we’re doing on tumultuous environments. Because if you can’t … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Leadership, Management

You have a great enterprise that has a very strong set of values that’s married to a very insightful strategy. That is then translated into a set of disciplined decisions, mechanisms, cultural practices and a variety of other things that really bring the strategy to life so that you can make good on it. And when you look at that chain, the great danger comes … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Collins | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Strategy, Success / Failure